Opera accused of censorship, betrayal by Chinese users

"Opera, the maker of Web browsers such as the popular "Opera Mini" for Java-based mobile phones, has been accused of betraying its users in China, by apparently caving in to top-level demands to stop allowing China-based users to use the international version of the Opera Mini browser.

This stems from a unique feature of Opera Mini, where the traffic is sent via Opera's own servers, for the speed and convenience of its users, most of whom use the slowest GPRS mobile connection. But in China, the pleasant side effect of that rerouting has been that Opera Mini is effectively allowing users in China to easily circumvent the so-called Great Firewall of government-implemented Web filtering. Thus, Chinese users, up until yesterday, were merrily logging into Facebook--which has been blocked here pretty much all year--on their mobile phones using Opera Mini. Not any more.

Of course, the Norwegian software company is not the one who enforces the nationwide censorship of hundreds of Web sites--it's yet another company which has had to comply with local laws and idiosyncrasies, however uncomfortable it feels about this--but now Opera has become somewhat complicit in it.

Anyone now trying to access any Web site at all on the Opera Mini browser (versions 4 or 5 Beta), when inside China, gets the "friendly" notice, in Chinese and English: "For better browsing experience, please upgrade to Opera Mini China version on mini.opera.com." That message, however, is clearly a lie, as the Chinese version of the browser no longer reroutes traffic via Opera's 100 proxy servers worldwide. So, it'll be slower than before. Instead, the newly enforced Chinese-language version uses only locally based servers, and hundreds of Web sites are now inaccessible with it. That's hardly a "better browsing experience".

So, Opera's users in China are now being held at software update gunpoint, and must use the Chinese-language version of their browser.

According to a recent Opera press release, China is number 4 on its list of the most Opera Mini users worldwide. So that's a large number of angry customers today who are being forced to "upgrade" to an inferior version of the browser, and many Chinese users are feeling betrayed, as if they're second-class users.

PR nightmare for Opera
On Twitter today and yesterday--yes, there are clever ways of getting on Twitter in China, without a VPN--many of the tweets using the "gfw" (Great Firewall) hashtag were talking about Opera Mini, why the international version was no longer working, and some were even venting anger at Opera for seemingly kowtowing to an oppressive law. Here are a selection of the tweets: ..."

Source: Steven Millward, CNETasia.com

Read the full article at http://asia.cnet.com/blogs/sinobytes/post.htm?id=63015016#talkback

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